At the Rome Film Fest: 'Walt & El Grupo'

I was totally confused about how (and whether) my credentials would allow me to see a movie here in Rome... so I wound up sitting in the rush line for 'Walt & El Grupo,' a documentary about Walt Disney's trip to South America in 1941. After about ten minutes there, a nice fellow came up and handed me an extra ticket, so I went in.

The film was made by Ted Thomas, son of the great Disney animator Frank Thomas, and he was in the house to introduce his film. Last night was its European debut.

What I liked best about the movie was its jaunty Latin American soundtrack and its sense of context: 1941 was a difficult time for Walt and his studio... with war raging in Europe, his income from the continent was sagging...his animators were on strike...and he "partnered" with the U.S. Department of State to go on an all-expenses-paid goodwill tour of South America. The trip was part diplomatic mission (to persuade South American countries to align with the U.S. and not Germany), and part a voyage to collect new material for his cartoons (resulting in 'Saludos Amigos' and 'The Three Caballeros,' among other films).

But the movie ends up feeling too much like an itinerary-based family slide show... "First we went to Argentina, and here's what we did..." Since none of the trip's participants are still alive (or at least none who were interviewed for the film), you never get to know them very well. As a result, the film suffers from a major personality void.

Pixar and the Internet: Do they get it?

Few people would argue that Pixar has put together the most high-powered animation team since the heyday of Disney.

But are they focusing on the right challenges?

Harvard Business Review has an article and podcast featuring Pixar and its co-founder, Ed Catmull.

Every since the company made 'Toy Story' in 1995, Pixar has produced three products: short films that let it test out new technologies and techniques (these are shown at SIGGRAPH, sold on iTunes, and played before Pixar's features in theaters), full-length features, and animation software called Renderman.

Around 2003, the company shifted from making one feature every 24 months to one every 12 months - which was a big deal.

In 2006, after Disney acquired Pixar, Catmull and John Lasseter essentially took over Walt Disney Feature Animation.

That's a lot of work.

And yet I'd still argue that the big challenge for Disney and Pixar to be thinking about is animated content for the Web... stuff that can be produced less-expensively, that connects with audiences in different ways, that takes big risks Pixar wouldn't take on the big screen.

Imagine an embeddable animated character for your MySpace or Facebook page that would greet visitors with a different quip every time they came. Or content delivered to cell phones that might introduce you (and your kids) to the characters in the next Disney or Pixar feature -- and reminding you to see it in theaters or buy the DVD. Or a Pixar serial, updated every week online, that might eventually add up to a feature?

(Of course, when DreamWorks Animation tried to do a TV show, things didn't work out so well... but I think that was a risk worth taking.)

One of Walt Disney's genius moves was to look at television and realize that it was not just a medium for promoting his movies... but also a medium that presented new creative opportunities. Ask anyone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s whether watching Disney shows on TV, like the 'Davey Crockett' series, had an impact on their childhood. It certainly had a major positive impact on the Walt Disney Company.

I'd suggest that the Internet today is what TV was in the 1950s - a medium that offers the chance to take big creative and business risks, and potentially earn big rewards.

Will Pixar?

Five Oscar Wins That Shaped the Movies

Looking back at the history of the Academy Awards, there were five Oscar wins that were central to the evolution of the motion picture industry, changing the way movies are made by directors and experienced by audiences.

Technological innovation, in my opinion, not only created the movies, but insured that the art form would remain an important part of American culture over more than a century.

So, in chronological order.

1. At the very first Academy Awards ceremony, held in 1929, Warner Bros. received a special award for producing 'The Jazz Singer,' "which has revolutionized the industry." 'The Jazz Singer' wasn't the first time anyone tried to add sound to motion pictures (see Phonofilm and the Kinetophone, for instance), and the movie still relied on title cards. But its success convinced Hollywood that audiences wanted to hear actors talk -- and sing.

Al Jolson "Blue Skies" The Jazz Singer 1927

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(Video: Al Jolson singing 'Blue Skies' to his Mammy.)

2. A decade later, in 1939, 'Gone with the Wind' won the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Art Direction. While it wasn't the first movie made in Technicolor (Disney had first used the three-strip Technicolor process for an earlier Oscar winner, the animated short 'Flowers and Trees') it represented the "tipping point," when mainstream Hollywood was finally convinced that shifting to color production made sense.



(Video: Rhett puts the moves on Scarlett.)

3. Movie soundtracks were recorded in mono for most of the 20th century. Walt Disney tried to bring more depth and nuance to the theatrical experience with 'Fantasia' in 1940, using multi-channel sound for the first time in a commercial release. (As many as 54 speakers were installed in some theaters, with the soundtrack recorded optically onto a second strip of film that ran in sync with the picture.) While Disney won an honorary Academy Award certificate for "outstanding contribution to the advancement of the use of sound in motion pictures through the production of Fantasia" in 1942, it was another 35 years before stereo sound at the movies became truly widespread, with the introduction of Dolby Stereo soundtracks in the late 1970s.



(Video: Part of the 'Rite of Spring' dinosaur sequence.)

4. Here's a movie few people remember: 1953's 'The Robe,' starring Richard Burton. It won two minor Oscars, and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Cinematography. 'The Robe' was the first feature released in Fox's CinemaScope widescreen format. While other widescreen movies also won Oscars (like the Cinerama release 'Around the World in Eighty Days', in 1957), it was the CinemaScope format the persuaded most theater owners to leave behind the square old Academy ratio and start showing widescreen releases (in part because CinemaScope was a less-expensive system than others, and in part because of Fox's salesmanship). The transition to majestic widescreen in the 50s and 60s also helped Hollywood remain relevant as Americans were installing televisions in their living rooms.



(Video: A fanfare for Caligula.)

5. 'Star Wars: Episode IV' wasn't the very first movie to incorporate a computer-generated visual effects shot (a wire-frame animation of the Death Star's architecture), but it was the first to win an Oscar: Best Visual Effects, along with five others. The 1977 blockbuster heralded the arrival of digital tools for crafting objects, characters, and environments that look real (but aren't quite.) George Lucas' and Richard Edlund's pioneering use of computers in 'Star Wars' led to not just 'Tron,' 'Titanic,' and 'Lord of the Rings,' but also 'Toy Story' and 'Shrek.'



(Video: Original 'Star Wars' trailer.)

I know I've left out plenty of other significant wins (such as 'Lawrence of Arabia,' which used an innovative, custom-built lens from Panavision; 'The English Patient,' the first movie edited digitally to win the Best Editing Oscar; and dozens of important Science and Technology Oscars), but these are my votes for the milestone Oscars, from a CinemaTech point-of-view.

I'm eager to hear what you think...

New Pixar Documentary: 'The Pixar Story'

I'm eager to see the new doc 'The Pixar Story' when it's broadcast on TV, released on DVD, or released theatrically. (It played last month at Comic-Con.)

It was directed by Leslie Iwerks, the granddaughter of Ub Iwerks, who was Walt Disney's original partner. (An earlier film and book she produced focused on Ub's career.) Her production company has a Web site, but it's woefully short on clips from her work -- including the new Pixar project.

From Peter DeBruge's Variety review:

The movie is, above all else, a celebration of animation in all its forms. Iwerks naturally has a firm grasp of the medium's history and rightly sees Pixar as the catalyst for the recent resurgence of audience interest in animation.

Early in the movie, Lasseter credits the book "Walt Disney's Art of Animation" with inspiring him to enter the field, and Iwerks' film will no doubt have a similar effect on future generations. She focuses less on Pixar's behind-the-scenes methodology (with good reason, considering how exhaustively those details are chronicled on the Pixar DVDs themselves), but presents a treasure trove of rare footage, including clips of Lasseter's first two Student Academy Award-winning film-school projects, "Lady and the Lamp" and "NiteMare," which presage "Luxo Jr." and "Monsters Inc."

Iwerks also includes the computer-animated "Where the Wild Things Are" demo Lasseter and Glen Keane developed for Disney, as well as Catmull's U. of Ohio experiment in rendering his own hand (the first 3-D computer effect featured in a movie) and Loren Carpenter's 1980 fractal landscape experiment "Vol Libre" (which enabled Pixar's work on "Star Trek II").

Here's the IMDB info.